Product versus Process

While trolling through some notes on book and article publishing, I discovered an old book recommendation for junior faculty: Wendy Belcher's Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks (the intro and first chapter are available as free samples from the publisher's website).  I ordered it from our library and printed out the samples and have been working through it ever since.  It's tempting to think of oneself as above "how-to" guides, but frankly, I'm not that unique nor the exception to the rule.  This is a recurring theme in my life these days: I'm not so different from everyone else, and that's just fine.

The most powerful epiphany I've had so far came from an exercise where you scribble down the emotions you have about writing.  I immediately separated those emotions into two categories: the writing I do for my job and the writing I do for myself.  Writing for the job elicited a host of negative feelings like guilt, burden, isolated, paralyzed, inadequate; writing for myself, however, turned words like joy, freedom, silliness, eagerness.  Why such a difference?  Clearly, I like to write, so why does it all turn so sour when I think of writing in my area of most intense study?

I realized that what sabotaged my professional writing was my preoccupation with the product.  Rather than enjoying the process, I was plagued by fears about the outcome.  Would it be publishable? In the right places? Will it "count" for promotion? Will it undermine publishing my book (currently on hold)?  When I write for myself, I am at leisure, enjoying just rolling words around the page, crafting them (at least a little bit), making jokes.  I am unhurried and free.  Nothing constrains my choice of subject, my length, or my quality.  I can just write, and delight in it.

To bridge this gap, I have decided to stop obsessing about what's "best" to publish, and just focus on what I'd enjoy writing up.  I will pray to be faithful and truth-loving in my process, and pray that God would make the product glorifying to Himself, regardless of what it does for me.  I know I cannot control outcomes in the lives of my students or my family; now I realize that I cannot do so for writing either, no matter how much it seems that it is I alone who make this product.

A Scale is Never Neutral

This morning, I walked into the women's restroom in our administration building and was surprised to find a scale tucked into the corner. My thoughts went something like the following:

Why is this here?

Is there one in the men's bathroom too? I bet there isn't!

Oh, calm down - maybe someone is just trying to lose some weight and this is helping her.

But still! how is this not a suggestion to every woman in this building that she needs to measure up and might be failing?

Who can I complain to about this?

Wait, I wonder how much I'm weighing these days, after Al's birth...hmmmm.....

Wait, if I weigh myself, am I showing myself totally hostage to an image-based assessment of myself?

Relax and stop overanalyzing - just have a look at how much you tip the scale

[check to see if I can read it without my glasses]

Shoes or no shoes? No shoes.

[Result: just shy of 150, near my pre-pregnancy weight]

Hunh. That was unexpected.  I weigh practically what I weighed before, but still have lots of new pooches.  How does that work? Will they ever go away?

Should I feel guilty that I weighed myself?

...Well, at least now I have something to write my 500 words about!

As a woman in this culture, a scale is never neutral; it poses a dilemma and a temptation. 

During most of my pregnancy, I ignored the scale except when at the doctor's office.  Since I lost weight early on due to feeling sick to my stomach, I was happy to be gaining weight, happy to eat just about any full meal, no matter how atypical.  Somehow, In 'N Out burger never seemed to pose problems to my appetite, even though home-cooked chicken stew was noxious to me.  I'm not even sure what I weighed towards the end (I think just over 170, just shy of 25 pounds of gain) and I didn't care what I weighed in the first 6 weeks after birth. But after those first two months, people start wondering aloud at you about your weight. My dear mother, bless her, started hinting that we should get out and walk the pounds off together. I was (and still am) still wearing maternity clothes and began to wonder when (and if) I would get a semblance of my body back. The necessity of buying new (and bigger) clothes loomed before me. Even affirming comments ("wow, you already look great!") prompt internal criticism ("I guess she can't see the pooch, and the extra loads in the legs and arms that tighten my sleeves and necessitate wide-leg pants"). 

My body is not only a bit larger; it has changed its overall shape from pear to hourglass/apple. After years of dressing as a "pear", I no longer know how to dress myself. Nursing has wreaked havoc on my ability to fit into tops: to get shirts to fit on my ample top (and be easy to nurse with), they have to be huge on the bottom as well as long for my lengthy torso.  Hence, I'm still wearing maternity shirts! And let's not talk about bathing suits beyond the observation that with a long back and a nursing upper half, the tankini is the only option.  As there are almost no modest tankini's with the ability to support my upper half, hoochie-mama here I come. 

Nursing mothers typically need to consume lots of water and about 500 extra calories a day. I'm hungry all the time, and mostly crave sweets. Just drinking water doesn't do it for me, but give me some juice (or even better, a Jamba Juice!) and I'm in heaven...until the extra calories pull me back to purgatory.  Now I feel that I have "watch what I eat" and just be a bit hungry all the time so I don't gain weight.

So here I am, an educated, confident woman, slightly obsessed with her weight and body. Much as I know my own value in the sight of God and those who love me is secure, I am not immune to the siren song of the scale and what I think it purports to say about me. 

The dilemma posed to me was to know or not to know a measure that says little about my overall health or about my self.  Idle curiosity versus a pretense of indifference. If I truly were indifferent, it would be no dilemma.

The temptation posed to me was to use the scale's measure as a measure of things beyond my weight: of my self-discipline, of my time management, of my desirability to Pancho, of my professional stature (sadly, pudgy women professors command less respect). It could never have been registered as anything but a rebuke.  I could have weighed in at my college weight (135) and still felt chastened. 135? Nice going! Now you have to weigh even less to lose this extra pudge! That it doesn't matter what the scale says shows how I already tie the scale's measure to a critical view of my body and my self. In that sense, the scale only furnishes me an opportunity to articulate what I already think about myself. It is a mirror only in the sense that it shows me what I already imagine myself to be. Thus, it is no mirror at all, but a canvas upon which I paint my self-caricature.

Freed from sin and from the wounds inflicted on me by our image-obsessed culture, I will one day relish tiptoe-ing onto the scale out of a true and holy curiosity that can look at any number as a fact about the world and about myself to be celebrated and enjoyed. I will be able to walk into a bathroom with a scale and regard it as a child, who will feed a quarter to to that giant scale staunchly stationed on the train platform. Neat! I get to see how much I weigh - how fun!

Writing Retreat

My university is generously sponsoring a writing retreat this week on campus, and, thanks to Grandma and Abuelita, I am attending all three days.  In fact, I'm there right now.  I have realized that I am so woefully out of practice writing that I'm having an inordinate amount of difficulty just setting down to it.  Thus, each day, one of my goals will be to write at least 500 words about anything.  Anything.  Just to write will be enough.  To give myself some bare accountability, I will post said 500 words each day on this blog.  

Sorry about that!

I have to run back to Al now, so my first day is a bit of a wash, since I only re-drafted an old post on coffee (below) and wrote this.  I will try to get a few more words in later today while Al sleeps.  If that is to no avail, I will START my writing day tomorrow with my 500 words. NO MATTER WHAT. 

See you tomorrow!

More on the Moka

Thanks to Jones Coffee Roasters of Pasadena I've been enjoying some pretty top-notch espresso made in the moka, and I've learned a lot from making a couple of hundred cups in this method so far. My rubber gasket was looking pretty worn, so I replaced it two days ago and discovered something interesting:

The newer the gasket, the lower the temperature of the flame and the less packed the grinds there needs to be.

Also:

Once you've brewed your preferred serving size in the moka pot, pour immediately. The best part of the brew occurs in the first seconds. This may mean that more may sputter out after you pour and that you make larger servings than you drink. Forget about the leftover coffee and throw it down the drain.

In fact, I now believe that the fit with the gasket makes quite a lot of difference to the finished result. Here's why: after I fitted my new gasket in, I made myself an espresso the way I always do, and suddenly the pot behaved very differently. It was back to sputtering and spitting quite early on in the brew, just as it had at the very beginning when I was learning how to use it. Sputtering in this way usually leaves you with boiled coffee - not terribly yummy. I prefer to have the brew escape in a slow, steady fashion. It's safer too! When it did this at first, I blamed the water temperature and the grind, but now I think it was a matter of temperature and amount of grinds.

For your reference, an earlier fact-finding mission on the web discovered this helpful link. And my recent read of acclaimed coffee guru Kevin Knox's (of The Coffee Review) book Coffee Basics has panned the moka pot as a general killer of coffee in comparison to the virtues of the French press, Aeropress (his and our favorite for best coffee taste), and paper cone filter methods. From Knox I also learned the true shelf-life of coffee and the true shelf-life of ground coffee (hours if not in an airtight container, about a week max if in an airtight container away from light and heat). Since I preferred buying moka grind (thinking that it was the key to the perfect moka brew), Knox helped me see that I was drinking stale coffee within a few days of opening the canister. So a new tip:

If you buy ground coffee, store it in a airtight canister in a cool, dark place and drink it within a week, or sooner. Or just don't buy it ground.

Experience proved him right: I had a week-old Jones Cara Mia espresso in the canister and compared it to fresh ground from that day. There is no comparison. The freshly ground coffee was so dramatically superior I began to wonder why I drank the other instead of, say, Folgers or some other such horror. But I simply can't make it through 1/2 lb. of coffee in a week (especially not as a nursing mother). So I'm a bit stuck: either I waste coffee (and take a trip out to Jones every single week) or get inconsistently ground coffee that might affect the quality of the brew (the jury is still out on that one). My current halfway house idea is to buy the 1/2 lb. at Jones (the smallest increment they sell), and then have them grind HALF of that, and take the rest home whole bean. Next time, Jones, next time...

When all is said and done, though, using a moka is a finicky way of brewing yourself coffee and tends to burn the coffee at least a little (and sometimes a lot, if you don't watch out or don't know what you're doing). Which is just as I'd like it to be. Who wants an easy way to brew? That takes half the fun out of making yourself some coffee. I want to fiddle and faff and have a good half-dozen mini-steps or tips to make it come out juuuuust right.

Coffee is no mere beverage or energy drink; coffee is leisurely activity.

Daddy's Dodger Girl

Al has been taking forever to get to sleep lately, so after a long nursing, I passed her off to daddy to finish the night-night routine. But, a Dodgers game is on, and lo and behold, what do I see but daddy and little girl peeking out around the hallway at the end of an exciting inning. Al had been pretty drowsy, but all of a sudden she realized the game was on and jerked awake, alert to the crucial part of the inning. Daddy!!! It's a half an hour later now, and I hear her sputtering in our bedroom, wanting to watch the rest of the game. I should have just let them watch the game, instead of giving daddy the "are you kidding me?" look and shooing them back into the boring, dark bedroom while the Dodgers took the lead during the 6th.

I guess she's daddy's little Dodger girl. My fault for dressing her in the Dodgers shirt this afternoon.